Yesterday Nancy and I were running a few weekend errands and after going to the OC Swapmeet we stopped at Omar's Birds on El Toro Road and purchased a few things for Tango, our African Grey Parrot. We bought his normal mix of seeds, some wood chips for the bottom of his cage, some extra goodies including peanuts, some seed he particulary likes, and two different mixes that you soak and then warm as an extra treat. You would have thought we had ten birds when you looked at all the stuff on the check out counter. It cost a small fortune.
While we were there we saw some large parrots climbing all over a cargo net that they had draped over some large tree limbs that were part of an out-of-cage play area. It looked like the birds were having a lot of fun with this net. In fact, I was so intrigued by it that when we got home I drove over to Lowe's and purchased about 50 feet of 1/2" hemp rope with the goal in mind of building my own mini cargo net to create a climbing area inside Tango's large cage.
After about 45 minutes I had created the net and the next step was to hang it inside his cage. I opened the door to let him crawl out and then with the assistance of Nancy, I began to secure it to the cage. Tango was watching me rather intently from the top of the cage as I began to tie the net to the top right corner of the rear of the cage. Suddenly he dove at my hand and clamped on to my left thumb. I reacted by jerking my hand away. Unfortunately for him, he didn't let go resulting in him being jerked from the top of the cage and into the wall and then falling to the floor. The end result was two large wounds in my thumb and a parrot with some likely body bruises and and an expanded vocabulary of cuss words.
Nancy has talked me out of just killing him and throwing him in the garbage, but I have decided that after spending all that money on him and his upkeep, I am going to cook and eat him. Does anybody have a recipe for parrot? The nearest thing that I have found so far is a recipe for cream of asparakeet soup.
2 comments:
I hear parrot stew is quite tasty.
The funny thing is that that as I scrolled down to the bottom of this post, the next picture was of you with a bunch of dead birds in the background. Maybe if you'd stop killing other birds Tango might not be so paranoid. I'm sure he can smell the bird blood on you each time you return from Mexico.
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